In my previous blog post I wanted to set the scene for this post on finding the balance between Unit and Functional tests. In that post we discussed the evolution of the Testing Pyramid and concluded that because it is only a model, we don’t have to strictly accept that we should always have more Unit tests than Functional tests. It’s about much more than just looking at the quantity of tests…

At work I was recently tasked with leading a case study that would explore the differences between Unit testing and Functional Testing, with the overall aim being to determine if we should be focusing on one over the other, perhaps even exclusively. I figured that since I was going to be doing this work, it would be a good opportunity to write a blog post or two on the subject….

In this post we are going to build on everything that we have learnt so far about Appium to write out first automated test in our IDE. Before continuing with this post, you should have followed everything in Part 1 and Part 2 first. For this example we will be using the Intellij IDE, if you need some help getting that setup and prepared for automation then do check out…

In the previous blog post in this series we saw how to use the Appium Inspector and the UiAutomatorViewer to interrogate our app and find details of the various elements. In this post, we are going to explore how we can write XPATHs to target those elements. If you have done any previous Selenium automation, then it is likely you will have at least some knowledge of how Xpath works. If…

If you have followed my series on Installing Appium on Windows then you should have Appium installed on your machine now but you are probably wondering what you are supposed to do next, and how exactly do you go about writing automated tests? Fear not! The next posts in this series on Appium from Scratch are going to guide you through preparing your app for automation, by first teaching you…

If you have successfully completed everything outlined in Part 1 and Part 2 of this guide, then you are ready to install Appium proper. Hopefully it wasn’t too difficult for you to get to this point, and maybe you already had a lot of the required software installed. I hope that you were able to get to this point quite quickly, because I found that it took me a while…

In this the next post in the series of “Appium from Scratch – Installing on Windows” we will look at how to get the Android SDK installed and how we can go about configuring Android Virtual Devices (AVDs) for testing on. If you haven’t checked the Appium prerequisites, then I suggest you check Part 1 of this series first. Assuming that you have all of the prerequisites installed, then let’s…

Welcome to this series on Appium! I have gone through more pain than I would have liked getting Appium installed and configured recently. There is some reasonable documentation and guides out there, but the ‘good’ information is somewhat scattered amongst various sources on the Internet and alot of it is out of date. I must also say that I found the documentation on the official Appium site to be quite…

I have been in my current job for around 5 months now. It is a relatively large multi-national company (around 6k employees), and anyone who has worked in this sort of environment will know that it is almost universally required for employees to have some personal objectives set for a performance review or appraisal that typically occurs every 6 or 12 months. Having these objectives in place (and meeting them,…

In my previous blog post on DevOps I gave an introduction and an overview of what I believe DevOps to be. To delve deeper into the subject, in this post I am going to talk about two primary reasons that an organisation would consider switching to a Dev Ops approach – Pain and Waste. What do I mean when I am talking about pain in an organisation? I mean the pain…